A simple, wholesome little adventure for young readers.
In Ballow’s debut picture book, a young girl loses her first tooth but doesn’t receive anything from the Tooth Fairy.
Sam, who has light brown skin and curly brown hair, loses her first tooth while chewing on crunchy cereal. She leaves it under her pillow, but in the morning is distraught to find the tooth gone and nothing left in exchange. Sam writes to the Tooth Fairy to ask for an explanation. The Tooth Fairy comes personally to investigate, riding her magical bird Gordy. Sam, her mother, and the Tooth Fairy search the house. Gordy pecks around outside, and in doing so gives himself away—he was the one who took the tooth and the gift, burying them as a joke. Realizing that this wasn’t funny, he apologies to Sam, who forgives him. Ballow employs straightforward prose, presented primarily against white backdrops kept separate from the illustrations. The story’s main plot point serves both as a lesson in coping with disappointment and as the basis for parent/child discussions about what sort of jokes are amusing versus those that are cruel (“Next time, let’s play a game we all think is funny”). Throughout, Sheikh brightens the proceedings with lush, cloudy, pastel-colored digital illustrations that capture Sam’s happy home environment. Though the characters’ sizes and skin tones are not always consistent, the images will hold younger kids’ interest as the narrative unfolds.
A simple, wholesome little adventure for young readers.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9798218123963
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Tooth Fairy Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Visually accomplished but marred by stereotypical cultural depictions.
Ellis, known for her illustrations for Colin Meloy’s Wildwood series, here riffs on the concept of “home.”
Shifting among homes mundane and speculative, contemporary and not, Ellis begins and ends with views of her own home and a peek into her studio. She highlights palaces and mansions, but she also takes readers to animal homes and a certain famously folkloric shoe (whose iconic Old Woman manages a passel of multiethnic kids absorbed in daring games). One spread showcases “some folks” who “live on the road”; a band unloads its tour bus in front of a theater marquee. Ellis’ compelling ink and gouache paintings, in a palette of blue-grays, sepia and brick red, depict scenes ranging from mythical, underwater Atlantis to a distant moonscape. Another spread, depicting a garden and large building under connected, transparent domes, invites readers to wonder: “Who in the world lives here? / And why?” (Earth is seen as a distant blue marble.) Some of Ellis’ chosen depictions, oddly juxtaposed and stripped of any historical or cultural context due to the stylized design and spare text, become stereotypical. “Some homes are boats. / Some homes are wigwams.” A sailing ship’s crew seems poised to land near a trio of men clad in breechcloths—otherwise unidentified and unremarked upon.
Visually accomplished but marred by stereotypical cultural depictions. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6529-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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